London performances of The Face of Jizo, the English adaptation of Hisashi Inoue’s Chichi to Kuraseba (Living with Father) (Oct. 23 – Nov. 10, 2007)

The London-based Japanese theater company “Ichiza” will give performances of The Face of Jizo, the English adaptation of Hisashi Inoue’s Chichi to Kuraseba (Living with Father) in London. (Oct. 23 Ð Nov. 10, 2007)
The main character of this play is Mitsue, a woman who lives quietly in Hiroshima with the sad burden of having lost all of her loved ones in an instant when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and being the only one to survive. Three years after that day she meets a young man who is absorbed in gathering documents and information about the atomic bombing and falls in love with him. But she feels guilty about being the only one of her family to find happiness, until her dead father’s ghost returns to encourage her otherwise.
This premiered in 1994, performed by the theater company “Komatsu-za,” for whom Inoue is the designated playwright. Since then it has been revived almost every year and has also been performed overseas, in France in 1997 and in 2001 by Komatsu-za in Russia. In 2004 it was made into a movie and has become one of Inoue’s most widely loved masterpieces. This is a work that Inoue hopes people in all the countries with nuclear weapons will see.

In 2003, the Performing Arts Network Japan began a program called the “Contemporary Drama Translation Project” for the purpose of translating representative works of Japan’s leading playwrights into English for dissemination to other countries. Unlike the arts of dance and music that do not depend on words, there are very few chances for plays written in Japanese to be performed overseas. In answer to this situation, this project aims to provide translations of outstanding works into English that speak of the contemporary world so that they can be shared with people of other countries. The six plays that have been translated thus far under the project are representative works of Japanese theater selected by specialists from among works written and premiering in the past ten years. If you are interested in using these works in translation for readings or performances, please inquire at the email address below.